Don’t Be Fooled. Disney Won Its Fight With the Press.

Journalists have become so powerless that they can now be safely ignored.

That’s not my view, but the view of the Walt Disney Company, which last week banned Los Angeles Times film critics from advance screenings of its films in retaliation for the paper’s September investigation of the extravagant tax breaks, rebates and subsidies Anaheim has bestowed upon its Disneyland theme park.

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Disney’s open defiance of the press didn’t last long. On Tuesday, it dropped the boycott after the New York Times vowed to boycott the company’s screenings until the Los Angeles Times was readmitted and after the leading film critic associations voted to disqualify Disney pictures from their year-end awards. But the brazen and petty way Disney challenged the leading paper of the West Coast hints that the long-standard balance between the press and the powerful has changed.

It used to be that nobody picked fights with people who buy ink by the barrel. Oh, companies have always pulled their advertising from news outlets when peeved by coverage or punished aggressive reporters by placing them on blacklists or by denouncing the press as irresponsible. But I can’t recall a major corporation punishing a newspaper’s movie reviewers—perhaps the most innocent of all God’s journalistic creatures—for the aggressive dispatches filed by their investigative colleagues!

A second wave of weirdness coats the Disney fight with the Los Angeles Times. Disney isn’t just any American corporation, it’s a $158 billion diversified media giant that employs thousands of journalists at its ABC News, ESPN, ESPN Magazine and TV news operations in seven of the nation’s top markets. It was a media organization boycotting another media organization! The two outfits have more genetic material in common than a raccoon and a coatimundi.

The irony of the boycott cannot have been lost on James Goldston, president of Disney-owned ABC News. Last March, Goldston loudly protested when the White House barred some news outlets (including Politico) from press secretary Sean Spicer’s press gaggle. “We’ve expressed our concerns to the White House that it operates in a way that’s open, transparent and fair,” Goldston said in a statement. “And we will continue to stand with our colleagues who cover the White House and to protest when any government official fails to live up to those standards.” One also wonders how Willow Bay, the dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, regarded the boycott? Her spouse is Disney Chairman and CEO Robert A. Iger, who had to have signed off on the boycott. Imagine the pillow talk between the J-school boss and the boycott enabler.

Perhaps the Disney brass forgot about its news holdings long enough to internalize and act on the anti-press stance of President Donald Trump. Throughout the 2016 campaign and his presidency, Baby Donald taunted and threatened reporters as part of his winning formula. When he started with this shtick, pundits predicted that he would pay the price down the line. You can’t get away with rumbling with the press forever, right? But you can, and Trump did. People cheered when he called the press “fake.” Trump intuited that the popular regard for the press has grown so weak that it need no longer be feared. He startled the other candidates with his ability to win primaries and the nomination without having to charm reporters or accommodate editorial boards and publishers. Other candidates might choose to run against Washington, he would run against the press.

Trump’s basic intuitions were rewarded. The Pulitzer Prize for national reporting went to a reporter whose series revealed him to be a cheat and a liar. But it made no impact on the election. Trump ultimately got only two big newspaper endorsements, and from minor papers at that (the Las Vegas Review-Tribune and Florida Times-Union). But he won the election anyway. A couple of months after the inauguration, he mused about jettisoning his press secretary and canceling the White House press briefing to punish the contentious press corps. The press is so dispensable, Trump showed his followers, that even Disney has agreed to act on his insight. By aping Trump, Disney has encouraged individuals and institutions covered by the outlets it owns—ABC News, ESPN, and local TV news—that snitty boycotts are the correct way to register disapproval.

Even the way Disney finally backed down was Trumpian. Initially, it refused to answer press inquiries about the boycott. Upon lifting the boycott, it declared victory, stating, “We’ve had productive discussions with the newly installed leadership at the Los Angeles Times regarding our specific concerns, and as a result, we’ve agreed to restore access to advance screenings for their film critics.”

We’ve now returned to the status quo ante, where newspapers are once again free to give maximum free publicity to Disney products. It’s enough to make you think that Disney CEO Iger, who has flirted with reporters about running for president, got the script for this whole drama from Trump.